AMD Definitely Not Buying Ageia

The title of this story might imply to you that there was some reason to suspect that AMD was going to buy Ageia and you’d be right to think so. The rumour stemmed from Richard AMD’s Huddy stating, that “we’ve had that discussion, yes, it’s a discussion that goes around every three months – someone turns to me and says ‘why don’t we buy Ageia?’ and I go through the arguments about why we should and why we shouldn’t.” Coupled with Intel’s recent purchase of Havok, this ended up being interpreted by some as AMD seriously considering stumping up the cash for Ageia, which according to Huddy isn’t the case.

Speaking to The Inquirer, he said: “I think my words have been taken to mean more than they really do.

I said that I wouldn’t rule it out and I said we’re not likely to splash $100M on a PPU vendor, and I said that we go through the arguments every few months.

That’s certainly not something that I would have headlined as ‘AMD considers buying Ageia’. The thought has certainly passed through our minds – but then humans think about a lot of things, and if you look at what I said I also point out that the cost is crazy high, so actually I come very close to ruling it out.

As far as I can see there’s really no news here. Everyone in the industry understands that Ageia’s primary aim is to just to be bought, and we’re one of the companies that needs to work out whether we think it makes sense.”

Sorry for the long quote, but I think the full body needs to be read to get the point across. Personally, I agree with Huddy; while reportedly Intel stumped up in the region $100 million that doesn’t mean a similar price is appropriate for Ageia. First, Havok has a mass market product (Valve’s Source engine, World in Conflict, Halo 3, the list goes on) and Ageia has, well, a UT3 add-on pack. In fairness to Ageia, AMD and nVidia had both been working on GPU accelerated Havok physics, but as Intel sells CPUs, not GPUs we don’t know if that program will continue and on that basis Ageia becomes a more viable acquisition for nVidia and AMD; even companies such as Sony or Microsoft might consider the purchase. So there you have it, everyone knows Ageia wants to be bought out and no-one is going to pay the current asking price – quite a dilemma.